RIMBAA: UMC St Radboud Nijmegen
RIM based Electronic Health Record in Nijmegen, the Netherlands
At the University Medical Centre St Radboud in the Dutch town Nijmegen, located in the East part of the country, a centralized set of tools for care process modeling, application design with order management and information integration has been developed, which is based on and driven by HL7 v3 derived concepts and artifacts. The HL7 v3 database platform is becoming the central part of the Electronic Health Record for the hospital.
Of course HL7 v3 was primarily started to offer a standardized way of exchanging health care information between the almost uncountable applications and solutions in health care or health care related institutions. The main product of this endeavor is the definition of XML schema's for HL7 v3 messages supporting generally useful information in Health care, that can be exchanged between computers in a network. Abstracting from technology, a message is by definition an ordered set of statements that is transmitted between persons in order to achieve a predetermined goal. This set of statements is often stored in some form to bridge the separation of sender and receiver in time and place. A hand written letter, transported by postal services, is the classic methodology for the persistence of the transmitted information, which most typically needs to be interpreted by a properly trained receiver brain to meet the objectives of the sender. Computers are much less smart and harder to train (typically they not trained put programmed) so here comes HL7 v3 to help the trainers. Essentially, HL7 has developed a framework to transform universally occurring statements in the health care domain into a standardized and processable format. Both the primary sender and the final receiver of a communication are still humans, although robots may appear as final receivers. Using Hl7 v3, real life processes must be transformed into human language, then into an information model which can be stored in a programmable object, serialized, transmitted over the wire, processed and persisted by the receiver, and finally presented to a human user at some time. In all these tranformations the technical bearer of the informtion may change dramtically, but the process model of real life is more or less constant.
This line of thought was the central idea to use HL7 modelling in a number ways:
- a conceptual tool to describe processes
- using the HL7 v3 defined interactions as a starting point to realize use cases
- XML messages to carry a hierarchical set of statements
- using the HL7 v3 base classes for database design
- using the HL7 XML to derive GUI components for reports, tables and forms
